LLOYD MANGRAM’S LOOKBACK AT 1986

Another hectic year lies all but drawn to a close in CRASH
terms, and the last pages of this Christmas Special are making their way from
the typesetters ‘up’ to ART. I am left here putting the finishing touches to
my annual review of the year, before I cycle across town to the Grovel Hill
headquarters of LM to make my contribution to the January issue. It has
been a very busy year, and I foresee even busier times ahead.
I only wish my pay increased in direct proportion to my workload...

Without doubt the prevailing trend of 1986 was for coin-op
conversions, with the field being led by Elite (Capcom) and Imagine (Konami).
As a result of the success of such conversions, Konami have now decided to
go it alone, forego licence royalties and capitalise on the immense
commercial possibilities of ‘sourcing their own product’ to slip into the
jargon so beloved of the trade.

The trend towards budget games was difficult to avoid spotting during
the year. A host of new labels were launched, most of them coming from
established ‘mainstream’ publishers, and most of them turning out
mediocre product — although there were a few bright spots on the
budget front.

It has been an interesting year, ending with dark rumours that at least
one of the giant corporations that have been acquiring smaller software
houses (another ’86 trend) is planning to leave the market in 1987.
Whatever rumblings this move may cause if it takes place, the TV, film, book,
personality and toy tie-ins look set to continue almost unabated. The
views on licence deals expressed by the Canvas team in our feature on
Denton Designs later this issue are very interesting...

But on with the appraisal of 1986, a year which saw the departure of
Clive Sinclair from the home computer market, and which produced
some vintage software as well as some games that have already been
cast into the murk of the CRASH Towers cellar, never to see the light of
day again... some might even argue that they should never have seen
the light of day in the first place....

JANUARY

The Christmas Special for 1985/6, which is really the January
issue, got the year off to a good start for Mastertronic, who collected a
Smash for Spellbound, scoring a very respectable 95% overall. This
was a good beginning to the year for programmer David Jones and
his cute character Magic Knight — and it wasn’t to be his only Smash
of the year...

The year also began auspiciously (LMLWD) for Walsall-based software house
Elite, who collected one Smash for a surprise game which they were sent
from out of the blue: Roller Coaster, and another for the first of many
coin-op conversions they were to produce during the following twelve
months: Commando. In fact, Elite had decided to go for a placing
in the upper echelons of the software industry during 1986 — and during
the year they released a lot of very strong products, concentrating
mainly on coin-op conversions.

The end of 1985 saw Mikro-Gen’s brave attempt at improving the
Spectrum’s capabilities with the launch of the Mikro-Plus, an interface
that included a ROM, and allowed programmers to write larger games for the
basic 48K machine. Sadly, the first (and only) game to appear on the
Mikro-Plus system, Shadow of the Unicorn wasn’t anything terribly
special. At £14.95 it was expensive: retailers, however, didn’t get to
make their standard percentage of the selling price — the hardware add-on cost
over £4.00 to manufacture — and it wasn’t a very attractive proposition to
the trade. The whole concept, greeted with enthusiasm in some quarters and as
the answer to piracy in others (a Mikro-Plus game could only run with
the hardware, and each game needed its own special interface), fizzled out
rapidly. Mikro-Gen were left with an embarrassingly large quantity of
redundant units, and entered 1986 licking their corporate wounds. Innovation
doesn’t always pay off....

After one of the longest delays in software publishing history (but not the
longest!), PSS released Swords and Sorcery — the innovative
dungeon-exploring game they had been working on for an embarrassingly long
period of time. Derek Brewster was impressed, and the game duly collected a
Smash. Later in the year, Role-Playing purists were to attack S&S in
the Signpost, but there was no doubt that Mike Simpson had broken new ground
and crammed his game with artificial intelligence routines. Still no news, at
the end of the year, of the promised expansion modules for dungeon explorers
though...

Liverpudlian software house Odin followed up their excellent Nodes
of Yesod with Robin of the Wood, a graphically stunning arcade
adventure. They then began to put themselves on the software map as the
producers of quality games — an epithet that their sister company, Thor
never quite managed to achieve. Coincidentally, Robot Messiah from
Alphabatim, a new company, was also reviewed in the Christmas Special.
Early in the New Year, Odin and Alphabatim were at legal
loggerheads over graphic routines — a little dispute that was quickly
settled.

Clive Townsend, a newcomer to the Spectrum programming scene
groomed by Durell, waded in with his first game Saboteur, and
collected his first Smash. What a start to a programming career! Insight
also stepped into the CRASH Smash Hall of Fame with a neat
shoot em up, Vectron, which was to emerge later in the year as a
re-release from Firebird. 1986 was to be a year of corporate
acquisitions.

FEBRUARY

Christmas has become a landmark for the software industry.
Obviously, people are in the mood for spending money during the
festive season, and software houses have always rushed to get
their best products on the shelves in time for the shopping boom.
Last year a lot of games missed the ‘peak’ selling period and to
quite a few people’s surprise, still sold remarkably well. Again in
1986, games continued selling well throughout the year — we
heard reports that even the slump in demand during the summer was
hardly noticeable.

The February Issue wasn’t short of Smashes. After living on tenterhooks
for months (ever since Jeremy ‘I want a Zoid’ Spencer first talked to
Martech and the Electronic Pencil Company), we
were finally treated to the finished Zoids in CRASH Towers. To a
being, we were impressed, awarding the game 96% overall. I have
spotted one or two voices of dissent in my mailbag since then, but
looking back I still maintain that the game was a major achievement.
One of the better toy tie-ins, that shines like a beacon above
Transformers, for instance...

The new Imagine, run and owned by Ocean — who purchased the
name from amongst the ashes of the original debacle (LMLWD),
also kicked into February with some powerful products. Two
coin-op conversions from the Konami arcade achieved Smash
status: Yie Ar Kung Fu and Mikie. Imagine managed to keep
up this pressure throughout the year...

An unbroken track record was maintained by Ultimate with
Gunfright, which used the same techniques as Nightshade, but
included a great deal more in the way of gameplay. Sweevo’s World
finally caught up with our deadlines, and was finished in time for a proper
review in February — having been treated to no less than two previews in the
months before as it neared completion. The game was a gentle departure for
Gargoyle — it was more of an arcade adventure than previous releases, so
much so that Greg Follis described it as ‘a piece of whimsy’. More radical
departures from the puzzle-intensive style of programming were due from the
Dudley trio later in the year...

A frustratingly simple game arrived from Spanish software
house Dinamic, courtesy of Gremlin, who also ‘imported’
Rocco, one of three boxing simulations that vied with each other in the
Spectrum ring for supremacy. West Bank took the reaction-test
type of game to its logical limit — all you have to do is press one of
three keys to fire through one of three doors presented on the
screen. Shoot the right person or object and points are won, shoot
the wrong person or a bomb and lives are lost. Almost minimalist in
its simplicity, the game proved mightily addictive. As a budget
game it would almost certainly have been a Smash, but at £7.95 it
earned a respectable 84%.

Regarded by some as the best of the boxing simulations, Activision’s
boxing game was endorsed by Barry McGuigan. Although it arrived months after
Rocco and Frank Bruno entered the ring, the extra training
appeared to give it the edge. On the adventure front, Activision
did particularly well with Mindshadow, which Derek recommended heartily
to anyone with the vaguest interest in adventuring.

Budget masters Mastertronic provided a rapid illustration of the
way in which ‘cheapies’ can vary in quality. They followed up on
their Christmas Smash with an appalling little game called 1985
(this would have been more aptly titled 1982), and the more respectable
Soul of a Robot. It just goes to show that reading reviews is highly
important when contemplating the purchase of budget titles.

Two companies that were to fade away quietly during 1985
appeared in FRONTLINE: Central Solutions who specialised in
‘Budget’ budget games (most of their catalogue had a retail price of
99p), weighed in with a mediocre strategy game called Just
Imagine, while Reelax Games revealed their approach to
commerce with The Trading Game. Neither impressed our tame
strategist, Sean Masterson.

Firebird, who had been quiet for a while, popped out with a
re-tuned, machine-coded version of Runestone, which they had
snapped up when The Games Workshop decided that publishing software
wasn’t a game they wanted to play.

MARCH

The Ides of March proved favourable for Mikro-Gen — they
staged a dramatic recovery from the Mikro-Plus setback by pumping three
games onto the market and collecting Smashes for two of them.
Sir Fred was ‘imported’ from Spain, and the endearing cartoon
graphics combined with tricky gameplay had the hero knight
trying to rescue his damsel in the middle of a game which became a
Smash. Three Weeks In Paradise, which proved to be positively the
last of the Wally Week games (so it seems, at least) also collected a
Smash. Another Mikro-Gen game, an in-house shoot em up vaguely
tied in to the TV series behind its title, Battle of the Planets,
fared slightly less well at the hands of our reviewing team.

The talented team at Denton Designs also paraded two games
in front of the CRASH joysticks — the follow-up to Shadowfire,
called Enigma Force and an original, multi-facetted romp featuring
sludge monsters and slime beasts entitled Cosmic War Toad. Both
games missed Smash status quite narrowly.

In fact, Liverpudlian companies featured very prominently in
March — Ocean turned in Rambo and NOMAD, achieving parallel
ratings of 79%, while Imagine released the work of a Hungarian
programmer in the form of MOVIE, gaining not an Oscar but a Smash.

In fact, releasing games in pairs seemed all the rage. Design
Designer Simon Brattel completed work on Forbidden Planet, which
was in effect a follow up to Dark Star, and Graham Stafford sent us
a production copy of 2112AD, the game which starred canine hero
Poddy.

Two Commodore specialists also released Spectrum games. Yabba Dabba
Doo appeared on Quicksilva’s label and was written by the
Taskset programmers, and Wizard Developments, the
company set up by Commodore star Tony Crowther, gave Spectrum
owners the benefit of a conversion of William Wobbler. They didn’t
regard it as much of a benefit, it seems...

March was positively a month of ‘2’s. Two adventure games were
Smashed: Lord of the Rings and Worm in Paradise, the third part of
Level 9’s Silicon Dream trilogy. Two games came from the US Gold
stable, one good one poor — Winter Games and Zorro
respectively. And the World War Two strategy/wargame that put you in
control of Britain’s airborne defences during the Battle Of Britain,
Their Finest Hour was looked at twice, by both Derek and Sean,
collecting a Smash from FRONTLINE. Mirrorsoft completed the Spitfire
picture for avid fans with the release of their flight simulation,
Spitfire 40, which zoomed up to the heady heights of
a CRASH Smash.

Mel Croucher, the man behind Deus Ex Machina and Pimania
amongst other things, came back from a short self-imposed exile
researching into new hardware and the software possibilities it
opens up, to produce ID for CRL — an unusual, text-based
entertainment in which the player had to coax and cajole a frightened
personality hiding in the Spectrum into revealing details of its past.

A few weak games arrived, including some budget titles and a
very tedious football quiz, but all things considered, March was a
very good month for Spectrum software...

Not a bad month for the Spectrum itself, come to that. We took
a look at the new 128K machine Sir Clive launched on the public,
and the speculation as to whether it would be a success began. Now
that Christmas is here, if the contents of my postbag reflect the real
world there is still plenty of speculation about the viability of Amstrad’s relaunched 128, the
Spectrum Plus Two.

APRIL

Whatever ‘Old Wives’ say about showers during this month — it
doesn’t hold true for games, although it rained games at CRASH Towers there was
only one Smash in the shower. Elite turned in a straightforward
implementation of Bombjack, which was devoid of frills but deliciously
playable. Not a case of pushing the Spectrum to its limits, but a very
entertaining and faithfully executed conversion.

A trio of games from Firebird’s so-called ‘hot’ range turned out to
be not-so-hot. Worst amongst the bunch was Gerry The Germ, a game full
of wit — well alright then, well-worn puerile humour — which lacked in the
playability department and attracted a very lukewarm 45%. The duo behind
Costa Caper, Messrs Marsden and Cooke (remember Technician Ted?)
got a bit warmer and collected 64%. ‘Hotrangewise’ as Herbie Hyperbole
Wright of Firebird might so easily have said, the lead game was
Rasputin, a jolly 3D romp against the forces of evil.

Star newcomer to the software world during April was Richard Welsh, whose
homegrown program Frank The Flea warmed everyone’s heart, and earned a
very respectable 57% for the novice programmer. We haven’t heard from Richard
recently, but his last stated intention was to buy a compiler and start writing
games that run in machine code.

Julian Rignall, one of the ‘Spiky Haired Ones’ from ZZAP! who terrorise the
Competition Minion, filled a guest slot by looking at the new games released
for the 128K Spectrum and found himself gently impressed by the capabilities of
the new machine. Praise indeed, from a dedicated Commodore arcadester.

As things turned, the final review for the rather strange surfing game,
Surfchamp created by Irish software house New Concepts, was not
as disparaging as most people in the Towers expected it to be. Perhaps the
psychological effect of using a rather silly-looking plastic surfboard didn’t
have as detrimental an effect as we first supposed... The New Concepts
advertisement hit an all-time low in terms of artwork standards, while their
promotional Sweat Shirts hit an all time high in the office. Isn’t life
strange?

The new Bug Byte, now owned in name by Argus Press Software,
chipped in with a couple of budget games, the best of which was the
rather tweely named Sodov The Sorceror in which you were
involved in asking marauding dragons to go away. Well, Go Away
The Sorceror wouldn’t have had much of a ring to it according to
Bug Byte supremo, Peter Holme... Roboto contributed little to the
world of budget games, but Realm of Impossibility contributed
nothing positive to the games-playing world or Ariolasoft’s
credibility. At £1.99 it would have been a very weak title, better
suited to release back in the pre-Issue 1 days, but at £7.95 in 1986
it was lucky to collect 10% overall. For the same money, Ariolasoft
were offering Think!, a very compelling icon-driven puzzle game
designed by Tigress, or for a pound more you could buy Skyfox
from the same company — a very competent flight simulator.
Perhaps Realm of Impossibility was Ariolasoft’s April Fool
joke...

Other disappointments for April (apart from Robin Candy’s face on
the cover and all over his Playing Tips supplement) included a new
release from Electric Dreams who had got off to a reasonable start
with I, of the Mask and Riddler’s Den. Winter Sports was
less than state of the art, and arriving as it did almost in parallel with
US Gold/Epyx’s Winter Games, a newly formed reputation was dented.
Blade Runner, from CRL was another disappointment — this
time for film fans. No doubt the licence was an expensive one, but
the product it inspired wasn’t... well, wasn’t inspired.

Overall, April was an interesting month, which saw a wide range of
software released including a football league strategy simulation, a
couple of puzzle games, a show jumping simulation (from Alligata — who
resisted the temptation to get their product endorsed and ended up doing a
reasonable job on an offbeat subject), a surfing simulation and a collection of
more usual, run-of-the mill releases. Most embarrassing game of the month
had to be Transformers, released by Ocean and programmed by
Denton Designs. Not their best work by a long chalk.

MAY

‘Never cast a clout ’til May’s out’ my grandmother used to
remind us all. Now we’ve entered the Binary Age, maybe software houses should
update the saying and make sure that they never master ’til the bugs are out.
May’s games were bug-free, and although rather fewer in number than other
months, they tended to be rather higher in quality.

Lead Smash of the month was the eagerly awaited Starstrike II
from the Masters of 3D (joint holders with Simon Brattel), Realtime.
According to Plan A, Starstrike II was due for release before
Christmas, and the trio at Realtime invested a significant sum
advertising the fact. Sadly, as is so often the case, deadlines slipped and
the game was ready for release (without bugs) several months later than
scheduled.

Nevertheless, it went down well in the Towers, earning gasps of
admiration from every reviewer who saw it on the CRASH office Spectrums, it was
clearly worth the wait. As I sit in my cramped office penning (well Hermes-ing)
these words, all the reviewers in the CRASH office are currently gasping in
admiration in front of another Realtime game, this time
Starglider, released by Rainbird. They haven’t lost their
touch...

Ultimate released their penultimate game for 1986 — Cyberun,
which duly scraped a Smash and joined another Konami conversion
from Imagine, Ping Pong at the 90% mark. Matchday
programmer Jon Ritman launched his slick 3D version of Batman on the
world via Ocean, impressing Batman fans everywhere with the gloss
and attention to detail invested in the program. And Gremlin’s
combat game, Way of the Tiger collected a creditable 93% which
pleased the firm’s boss, Ian Stewart, and meant that the tie-in
with Knight Books and the Way of the Tiger series of interactive ninja
fiction had paid off. Three companies had very near misses on the
Smash front: Durell still haven’t completely forgiven us for spoiling
their unblemished run of Smashes by awarding Turbo Esprit 88%
overall: Mike Daniels of Global winced audibly when he phoned in
to discover that Attack of the Killer Tomatoes, the first of his ‘Golden
Turkey’ film tie-ins, had just been pipped at 89% while Imagine
remained inscrutable about the 88% awarded to their conversion
of Konami’s Green Beret.

Rather unusually, a game from Atlantis got a double rating!
Opinion was so firmly divided in the office as to the merits of
Supercom, a hacking game, that it received 86% overall AND 21%
overall. Nothing like breaking with tradition...

Another combat game, this time a simulation of the pointy-stick school of
Karate, was launched on the world by Mirrorsoft but failed to add
anything significant to the genre. Exploding Fist seems to be
the classic in this field, even today. Another fighting game, this time of
the bombs and bullets variety, came from Alligata, who dared to
upset Elite, holders of the official Commando licence, with
Who Dares Wins II which finally appeared on the Spectrum screen
after some legal wrangling. With licences being expensive commodities,
the precedent for defending game scenarios and concepts was set — a major
departure from the early days, when I can remember a host of ‘clones’ appearing
around every ‘original’ idea...

Electric Dreams set off on the path to film tie-ins with a
disappointing rendition of Back to the Future, while on the licence front
Max Headroom broke the barrier to arrive on the Spectrum.
Deliciously different, Martech decided to licence a front — Samantha
Fox’s — which appeared in pixellated form in Sam Fox’s Strip Poker.
Some commentators suggested that Ariolasoft should have been awarded
that particular licence...

The first of the Lucasfilm games appeared from Activision in the
shape of Ballblazer — another delayed release — but this time
one which was greeted with a measure of apathy, and Atlantis did their
best to squeeze the last dribbles of humour out of the C5 in
Revenge of the C5.

JUNE

Halfway through the year, and the June issue was very thin on
the ground as regards licence deals and tie-ins. Ocean’s game about
the lizard-aliens that starred in the series V, The Young Ones
from Orpheus and the belatedly-reviewed Friday 13th from gore
masters Domark were the only games that featured characters
who had appeared on screens that weren’t attached to a computer.
There was nothing special about any of the three, and in fact The
Young Ones was a fair old disappointment.

An octet of Smashes appeared, including the first ever Smash for a
128K game — Knight Tyme written for Mastertronic by David Jones
(and later to appear in a 48K version). Phil Churchyard, a regular
contributor to Playing Tips POKEwise, collaborated with Paul
Shirley to produce Spindizzy which collected a Smash for
Electric Dreams, and made up for a couple of mediocre releases from
the Southampton-based company started by Rod Cousens.

Two adventuresome games collected Smashes, Heavy on the Magick from
Derek and Redhawk from the reviewing team. It looks as if Gargoyle
are going to be giving their adventure/puzzle games a bit of a rest for a while
as they concentrate on their arcade label, but Melbourne House released
the follow-up to Redhawk, Kwah just in time for a review in this
issue. And second time around, Derek Brewster gets to evaluate the
caped (or should that be feathered?) crusader’s deeds of derring-do.

Mr Masterson took the unusual step of re-Smashing Desert Rats
from CCS when it arrived in 128K form — claiming that he’d forgotten
first time around on the 48K version! And the issue concluded with three more
Smashes — Ultimate’s last game of 1986, Pentagram,
Gremlin’s vertically-scrolling platform variant with yet another
ball as hero, Bounder, and Quazatron from Steve Turner on the
Hewsons label.

As months go, June was quite high quality — only five games received less
than 60% overall, which indicated that a summer slump in games of quality was
going to be avoided this year: as indeed it was.

Large and complicated arcade adventures were flavour of the month during
June: A’n’F waded in with Core, Probe went all robotic
with Mantronix, and Glass programmer Paul Hargreaves completed
the monster game Tantalus for Quicksilva.

A pair of sequels came under our reviewers’ metaphorical microscopes — they
liked Alien Highway from Vortex, the follow-up to Highway
Encounter, but disliked Mugsy’s Revenge from Melbourne, which
was only saved from a trashing by the fact that a free copy of Mugsy was
included on the tape.

Despite the awful artwork in the advertisement, Legend of the Amazon
Women proved to be a passable beat em up from US Gold, while the
budget arm of the same enterprise offered the pseudo-mystical Secret of
Levitation, which failed to rise above the half-way mark in percentage
terms.

The Telecom team at Firebird went hedgehog crazy with Spiky
Harold, but failed to take advantage of the licensing opportunity
on the doorstep of CRASH Towers — the British Hedgehog Preservation Society has
its headquarters a few miles away from my home and I regularly encounter its
leading light, one Major Adrian Coles, as he constructs little ramps for the
spiky creatures to use to clamber out of cattle grids... Firebird’s
other June offering, rather late for the event it parodied, was The
Comet Game, a space romp loosely based on the arrival of Halley’s comet —
which had turned tail and travelled deep into space when the game was
released.

Time and celestial bodies wait for no man, and nor do American
Footballers. All the razamatazz surrounding the Superbowl had
faded in the memory of Channel 4 viewers by the time Ocean got to
the shops with Superbowl.

Unexpected arrival of the month award went to Addictive who came
to CRASH Towers without Kevin Toms, without Football Manager
and with Kirel, a cute jumping game that won the heart of our Girlie
Tipster, Hannah Smith...

JULY

The summer season began with a quartet of Smashes —
and four very different games they were. Over in adventureland, Derek was
knocked out by Level 9’s Price of Magik — a follow on to Red
Moon — which sends the player on a quest to learn about the mystical
arts. Derek insists that each of Level 9’s successive releases
contain that bit more magic, in terms of what they can do with the Spectrum.
Another classic coin-op conversion left the Elite stable in the
form of Ghosts ’n’ Goblins, and marketeers extraordinaire
Domark, finally collected their first ever Smash for Spitting,
sorry, Splitting Images. A very simple, and indeed ancient concept — the
sliding block puzzle — gained a new lease of life.

Could Gremlin get the hat-trick? In May they had a Smash. In June
another. July came, and with it the terrible antics of a wicked character who
could so easily have been the creation of an artist working for THE BEANO.
Jack The Nipper put an interesting slant on the arcade adventure format,
amused everyone and did indeed collect a Smash.

Three games that everyone had great expectations for also arrived
this month, and each of them proved a disappointment. Biggles
from Mirrorsoft certainly hadn’t been flying an undercover mission —
the game was tied in with the film of the same name, and the level of promotion
and publicity which it received meant that few people could have missed its
impending arrival. When the game came in to land, however, it proved
to be quite unremarkable. After a good six months’ delay,
Melbourne House released Rock’n’Wrestle, which had lost the ‘rock’
on the way to the ring and, without the endorsement of Big Daddy,
had very little to offer. July was also the month that we looked at
the game which fell shortest of expectations; the most contentious game of
1986, World Cup Carnival. A major licence deal, a large box crammed with
‘goodies’, a cassette — a cassette containing a marginally revamped football
game that originally appeared on the Artic label and was now very
long in the tooth.

A handful of budget games arrived, most of them mediocre but Snodgits
from Sparklers — a sort of detective game — took an unusual approach
and proved very playable. Firebird entered the budget arena with a
combat-decathlon variant Ninja Master, and the adventure scene with
Seabase Delta which somehow captured the imagination of Derek’s
readers, and was to appear in his letters page on a regular basis over
the next few months.

FRONTLINE looked at a pair of games from PSS, one good, one
not so good. Theatre Europe, a game with a rather sensationalist
subject, was the better of the pair and seemed likely to encourage
players to think about the implications of nuclear war, involving
them as it did in making decisions about the launch of nuclear missiles.
‘Everyone makes mistakes; this is PSS’s’ wrote Sean Masterson about
Iwo Jima. You can’t win ’em all!

Molecule Man from Mastertronic and Equinox from
Mikro-Gen offered quality fare for fans of the arcade adventure, while
Martech’s cunning space game, which was tied-in with an astronomer,
threw new light on the arrangement of our universe. The Planets managed
to combine elements of arcade, adventure and educational games and presented
a complicated and slightly daunting challenge to the player who set
out on a mission to — yes, at least that part was ‘standard’ — to save
the Earth from destruction.

AUGUST

The summer of this year was nothing spectacular — maybe people
kept releasing games because there was nothing more pleasant to do? Whatever
the reason, we were flooded with budget titles this month — unfortunately they
were mostly uninspiring.

Games involving balls were popular in 1986. Apart from kicking them and
hitting them in sports simulations, they also had to be bounced, rolled and
jumped through hostile terrain. Bobby Bearing from The Edge
rolled out into the Metaplanes this month in search of his cousins and found a
Smash on the way, and an anonymous football negotiated fire, nasty sharp pins
and boxing gloves amongst a host of other nasties in Mirrorsoft’s flip
screen arcade adventure Action Reflex.

Pumpkin fans got their chance to strike back in Cauldron II,
Palace’s sequel in which a cute bouncy pumpkin (nearly a ball, but not
quite) had to make his way round a flip screen castle in the best arcade
adventure tradition, collecting the wherewithal to depose the evil Hag.
Another Smash.

Firebird (perhaps spotting Sean Masterson’s favourable comments about
an old Red Shift game, Rebel Star Raiders some months ago), launched a
revamped version on their budget label and collected a Smash for their trouble.
Spotting a gap in the market and then filling it, is without doubt, the route
to commercial success!

Two quality arcade adventures also collected Smashes: Pyracurse from
Hewsons in which a large South American temple/tomb had to be explored
‘Raiders of the Lost Ark’ style, and Heartland from Odin who by
now had handed over the headaches of publishing games to Firebird and
were concentrating on writing them.

The first games arrived from the new budget label launched at chateau
Interceptor — Players — they were met with an almost unanimous lukewarm
reception, despite the Hip-Hop packaging. Our very own Derek Brewster also met
with a poor review for his new game, Con-quest which appeared on
Mastertronic’s MAD label.

A couple of clones poked their noses above the ramparts — Alligata’s
Budgie label turned in a fair rendition of the Wizard’s Lair theme with
Labyrinthion, earning 60% overall, while Ariolasoft published
another game from Dave Harper, Toadrunner, which bore a very striking
resemblance to his earlier work for Electric Dreams — Riddler’s
Den. Electric Dreams themselves gave film tie-ins a rest to release
Hijack, which puts the player in the role of a harassed American
official dealing with a terrorist incident.

Even though they collaborated with Ocean, US Gold didn’t manage to do
a particularly good job on their conversion of the ageing coin-op Kung Fu
Master, and their second budget release on the Americana label,
Subterranean Nightmare turned out to be a bit of a bad dream.

The rush to budget software didn’t appear to be producing anything special,
with mediocre products from Mastertronic, Central Solutions and
Atlantis filling the remaining review pages....

SEPTEMBER

Things quietened down over September, but at last Oli was able
to do the cover he’d been waiting to get to grips with, ever since he heard
that Dan Dare was on its way from Virgin. Despite repeated
requests, the team at Virgin simply hadn’t allowed a single early screen
shot out of their programming chamber, and when the game arrived it was a
complete mystery .... Moments after it had loaded it became clear that the game
did justice to the cartoon hero and a Smash was on the cards. Virgin’s
other game, Atlantic Challenger (which gives the player a chance to
control Virgin supremo, ocean racer and litter campaigner Richard Branson) did
less well. Maybe there should have been an arcade sequence in the park with
one of those pointed sticks... This was a good year for Mikro-Gen,
but perhaps a slightly bad month — their new game which introduced ‘Teenage
Superhero’ Ricky Steele missed Smash status by a single percentage point to the
disappointment of all down in Bracknell, where Wally Week is in comfortable
retirement.

Rod Bowkett’s keenly-awaited follow up to Dynamite Dan was completed
in time for review and lived up to expectations — another fairly
straightforward platform game, but one with so many added touches that a Smash
was inevitable. And two Smashes were awarded in the adventure world — one for
The Boggit, a delightful spoof on Tolkien created by Delta 4 and
published by CRL, and another Smash for Incentive’s
adventure-writing utility, The Graphic Adventure Creator which went on
to take the homegrown adventure world by storm.

Flight simulator fans were treated to ACE by Cascade, a
company whose reputation was founded in the budget compilation market, and
which moved towards mainstream games publishing with a very neat airborne
combat simulation.

Saving film tie-ins for later in the year, Electric Dreams went
aquatic, producing a whimsical undersea romp by the name of Mermaid
Madness, and an aqueous version of Panzadrome written by Ram
Jam and called Xarq.

Rupert Bear and Dangermouse starred in games from Bug Byte and
Sparklers respectively, but failed to achieve superstar status, while
Santa Claus made an unseasonally early appearance in a game from Alpha
Omega, the budget label created by CRL. No-one was likely to leave
out a glass of sherry and a couple of mince pies for this Father
Christmas....

After the problems they experienced with The Young Ones,
Orpheus decided to stop publishing games in their own right, and instead
concentrate on providing a programming and conversion service for other
companies. Tujad had been completed before the decision was taken, and
duly appeared on the Ariolasoft label, winning some admiration for the
graphics, but breaking no new ground as an arcade adventure. French software
house Infogrames did try to break new ground on the adventure/role playing
front, but somehow lost direction along the way with Mandragore.

As the September issue was being written, companies were gearing up for the
Personal Computer World Show and seemed to be saving the best for their
stands... with a massive preview section completed, the rest of the CRASH team
departed for Olympia leaving yours truly to hold the fort.

OCTOBER

The Personal Computer World Show, as always, was an event and
a half where all the leading lights of the software industry paraded their
promises for Christmas. C&VG carefully avoided parading Melissa
Ravenflame. Despite a hard-fought sticker war, the cartoon tipster failed to
materialise leaving the Show floor to our own Girlie Tipster Hannah Smith.

Trivial Pursuit arrived on the Domark stand at the show, and
collected another Smash for the marketeers in the October issue — after a
period in the doldrums (as far as ratings go anyway), Domark seemed set
to make their mark. Elite continued their coin-op conversions,
launching Paperboy and 1942 — Paperboy came remarkably
close to being a hit in the ratings, while the general consensus of opinion
surrounding 1942 was that it was an accurate conversion of a rather dull
game. But Elite wasn’t left out — Scooby Doo, a different
version to the one originally planned in late ’85 — collected a Smash.
Domination of the HOTLINE Charts seemed to be Elite’s aim ...

After a fairly long absence from the scene, Vortex bounced back with
a ball game from Costa Panayi — an elegant 3D puzzle cum arcade-adventure
entitled Revolution which completed the trio of Smashes for the
month.

Another bevy of budget games scurried in for review and were all poor to
awful except for Lap of the Gods from Mastertronic, which
followed on from One Man and His Droid and collected 80%.

Tennis from Imagine got a poor reception — the best of the
Konami coin-ops had already been converted, but the reception that Knight
Rider received was even less favourable. Despite the interminably long
wait (and the release of an early, completely different game through a mail
order catalogue) Ocean had very little to offer.

The seeds of controversy were sown in two reviews — Head Coach (see
the Christmas FORUM) and Zythum. Mirrorsoft weren’t terribly
impressed with our review and felt that we hadn’t done the game justice... The
favourable review Strike Force Harrier attracted did little to mollify
the affront.

Newcomers Piranha got their teeth into the software market, kicking
off with Trapdoor and Strike Force Cobra and narrowly missing a
Smash with Don Priestley’s colourful interpretation of the TV series starring
Berk and a host of strange creatures confined below the trapdoor.

The Spectrum Plus Two moved closer to being reality — sample machines had
been on display at the PCW Show, but didn’t get into the shops until much
later....

NOVEMBER

Once again, lots of budget games came under scrutiny, and
despite entries from Mastertronic and Americana, Firebird lead
the field in terms of quality with Bombscare, Happiest Days of Your Life
(a Wally Week clone — maybe the hero’s in retirement but the format still
lives), Olli and Lissa and Thrust. The Telecom team were let
down a little by Kai Temple, but no-one’s perfect, especially in the
budget world...

Smaller companies led the Smash field this month — Durell provided a
very unusual 3D game with an equally unusual title, Fat Worm Blows A
Sparky, Gargoyle treated everyone to an attribute-clash-free shoot em up,
and CCS impressed our tame strategist with Napoleon At War.
Infogrames, though by no means a small company, came very close to a
Smash with L’Affaire Vera Cruz, as did Gremlin with
Trailblazer and Ariolasoft with the original concept of
Deactivators.

Street Hawk finally got into the High Street and proved to be a
disappointment, but not as great a disappointment as Knight Rider.
Asterix was another long awaited game that proved less than wonderful,
despite the protracted development time, and Melbourne House did nothing
to improve their gently slipping image by releasing Conquestador, a cute
but unremarkable arcade adventure.

Controversy began to rear its head again, when we awarded Glider
Rider a Smash for the 128K machine, but didn’t make a song and dance about
it because the 48K game only merited 80%.

Another bumper 164 page issue was planned for December, to cram in all the
game reviews that we expected to have to cope with...

DECEMBER

With Christmas fast approaching, software houses began
revealing their prime programs. Out of some thirty games which we looked at
last month, only five scored less than 60% overall. Alpha Omega somehow
don’t seem to have penetrated the budget market with quite the right approach —
their games have consistently failed to achieve good ratings. More Omega than
Alpha, in fact, with Dr What collecting a mere 17%.

Codemasters entered the budget arena with a pile of titles, which
received a warm reception.

Otherwise no major surprises as promised Christmas games arrived for
review... Another twelve months of CRASH HISTORY was ruled off in the ledger,
and the New Year awaited eagerly.